Pas de deux
by Maribor
Summary: A sequel to Pasodoble so if you haven't read that one go there first. Essentially an exploration of the Doctors thoughts about the same event.


**Pas de deux**

There aren't any dances for three.

No beautiful, choreographed intimacies for a trio. At some point you must pair off and someone inevitably gets left in the cold. It's understood as a truth, perhaps even a universal one and still there are those of us who try and circumvent this fact.

There's a certain way people orbit each other when there's an attraction, unspoken or not. Their rotation around the other person gets smaller and smaller and smaller as if they're being drawn into a gravity well. The core of lust is like the center of a black hole, ominous and dark. Emotions like time are compressed so tightly nothing can get through. Not light. Not logic.

It is an absence of time and reason. And in this vacuum there is what I can only describe as a unified isolation that only they can feel.

I reject the title of lonely. If I were lonely I wouldn't have lasted as long as I have. And I have. I. Have. Lasted. Part of what has helped me last was keeping a conservative distance. Alright, there were times when I drew near to breaking my own rule. I danced on thin, narrow lines but I never faltered, I never fell, not completely at least.

What fells you is always the unexpected. The blow you never saw coming. You can plan and prepare for everything, every eventuality and still there will be something that completely upends you.

I thought that this time around that thing would be Amelia. My Amy with her red hair and full lips. He long legs and pale skin. For a while we danced, tracing dramatic circles around each other, pacing and watching and waiting. Daring to stand a bit too close, to spend a bit too long in the hushed and lazy silence at the end of a day that we miraculously survived. We were daring each other, testing and trying, wondering how far the other person would go until that last of lines was crossed.

We came _so_ close.

But eventually, we broke apart, we found our rotation, we found strength in our distance and our closeness. A binary star system is composed of a primary and a secondary...sometimes called a companion. Amy became my companion star.

And so we danced.

And when Rory arrived it was unclear what would happen next. What space would he occupy? What space would I. When binary stars lose their gravitational contact they can move closer and closer until eventualy they coalesce and for a single entity. Perhaps, I thought, that would be Amy and Rory. Conversely if they have to close of a brush up as she and I did on more than one occasion one of them can be ejected from the orbit completely and become a runaway star. That's is also what I thought, what I imagined would happen. Amy would become my runaway.

But it was a case of misdirection, I was looking at the wrong person. I didn't have my eye out for a rogue planet.

Rory slipped in quietly. And at the times when he thought he was attracting the least attention I couldn't keep my eyes off of him. His words, his jokes, the way he thought and moved, everything about him intrigued me.

Rory became my focus and to a certain extent Amy paled for me at his side. Our orbit broke because he broke it. He was my unpredicted celestial surprise, loosed from some other place, racing through the stars straight towards me.

I tried to sidestep him. I tried to push away. I tried to untether myself from my moorings but wherever I turned there he was there.

When he first arrived that night as I was working...actually before he arrived I knew something was going to happen. I had been talking to the TARDIS and suddenly she'd gone mysteriously silent. We communicate, you see, telepathically, long complex conversations not so much words but emotions, feelings, memories of home. All of a sudden she just stopped so, of course, I paused, asked her what was wrong and then, there he was.

I was surprised to see him but he was by no means unwelcome. Rory was a bit of a mystery to me. He always had been. I could sense his confusion, his inability to discern his place with Amy, possibly even with me. But that was the beginning. When he'd come back to us, after waiting 2000 years he was a different man. Stronger, smarter, more confident...more jaded and my need to be nearer to him grew all the more.

He seemed more at ease with me as well, calmer, certain of himself. And why not? He'd done what I couldn't, what I could never do. He had rooted himself to one spot and all in the name of absolute devotion. I wanted to know more, needed to know more. I would have planted myself at his feet and listened to every story he had to tell but I had no idea how to ask. No idea how to break us from the awkward two step and bring on a more intimate waltz.

That was why I was so pleased when he showed up. And we talked, over hot chocolate and Jammie Dodgers we talked in a way we didn't or couldn't when Amy was about. Two souls out on the dance floor after everyone else had long ago gone home.

I don't know if he knew that some of things I told him I'd never uttered allowed, never quite dared to think of much less say. I don't know if he understood that that quiet way about him, that soft gaze just engendered in me a sort of easy openness...or rather what counts as openness for me. I don't know if he grasped that and it wasn't as if I could tell him. So it became just another thing unsaid, another bit of clutter to litter our path, something else to step around.

I don't tend to get bogged down in attraction. I can appreciate a short skirt or a strong. masculine jaw like any other bloke but to experience it, to indulge, to stay, well, that's a whole other subject. That's commitment and commitment requires walls and promises and linear time and telly and newspapers and shopping lists and all manner of things I'm not prepared for and never will be.

Did I kiss him? Did he kiss me? Dd it matter? In that moment, no, nothing mattered. Nothing at all. All I wanted was his body against mine, his lips, his hands. I wanted to pull him to my bedroom, lie him down and tell another story upon his body. A story with my hands and my tongue, a dance of arms and legs and hips.

He was right of course, while I'm not nearly as altruistic as he painted me, I don't allow myself to partake. It wouldn't be right. Not just because I can't keep the promises he'd need me to but because everyone is wrong about Amy. She talks a good game but she's not nearly as adventurous and bold as she claims. In actuality she's rather conventional. She wants the excitement but at the end of the day she wants to return to the safety of Rory's arms and only his arms. Not that I blame her. No matter what she thinks she believes, underneath all the bravado, teasing and flirting she doesn't want to share.

Neither do I.

We've developed a strange orbit, the three of us, staying close, keeping our distance save for the one time Rory and I eclipsed one another, coming so near in the sky that for a moment our atmosphere's touched and merged.

And then it ended. I sent him back to his wife as I had to. I quizzed the TARDIS on what had brought him there in the first place and then saw to it that his sleep would never be interrupted like that ever again.

The Giving Tree...oh Rory...

You have no idea just how much, if given the chance, I would take.

But I've hurt enough of my friends. I won't do it again.

There are truths we must face, no matter how ugly.

There are no intimate dances for three.

And there never will be.


End file.
